Comments on: Does spelling matter?http://blog.oup.com/2013/04/does-spelling-matter-horobin/
Academic insights for the thinking world.Tue, 03 Mar 2015 16:32:55 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1By: peter marehttp://blog.oup.com/2013/04/does-spelling-matter-horobin/#comment-374730
Tue, 02 Apr 2013 03:37:23 +0000http://blog.oup.com/?p=37853#comment-374730Simon, Thank you for writing this piece. While you are right that it is hard to link low literacy rates (or PISA scores) to the phonemicity of a language, as there are so many factors that come into play, common sense would dictate otherwise. However, there is a little piece of information that can help settle the matter once and for all: there are 2 linguistic communities in Finland and they don’t perform in the same manner on the PISA test. In fact, the advantaged, upper-class Swedish-speaking Finns that you would expect SHOULD do better, perform much worse! Bear in mind that both communities benefit from the same system of education. As it turns out, Swedish is not as regular, as phonemic as Finnish is. Spelling does matter. An highly irregular system like English, if anything, DELAYS learning, reading, writing. In fact, it is so bad that many Commonwealth countries must spend a lot more money in education to mitigate (or obfuscate) the issue. If you don’t understand that a poor correspondence between letters and phonemes makes learning to read more difficult, then I might as well quit. Would you suggest that we make it worse? And by making it even more irregular, nothing would be changing? Now, the defendants of the status quo will point out that Canadian students do well on the PISA tests. They would be right. This can be explained again by the amount of resources that Canadians use to get there (.5% more compare to Finland). (Small differences until you realize that Finns start school at 7 and university is FREE). Anyhow, the English spelling system is so irregular that learners end up memorizing the bulk of words, which even Finns must do. Most mature readers do not decode methodically each phoneme. And, if they do, they do it much quicker, aided by all kinds of predictive strategies and shape of words as well. However, early learners don’t! They rely a lot on the spelling or phonemic system because they don’t know those nasty irregular sight words (the, an, a, are,…). They have a much tougher time predicting and using the context. THAT is crucial! Now, imagine an English reader interested in reading about dinosaurs! We all know how big those names can be. In Finnish, all of those words would be easily decodable the first time around, if one has memorized the phonemes of the Finnish system. In English, not so! In fact, modern literacy techniques tend to focus on memorizing all of those nasty irregular sight words because they usually carry little meaning and so are hard to guess. Now, imagine if the student wants to explore books that are written by professors. Finnish students, very early on, will be able to DECODE all of those words. Sure, they might not understand them all, but they will be able to accurately DECODE them and, next time, these students hear these more complicated words, guess what there is a good chance they will be remembered or be given a better meaning. This could not possibly happen to English-speaking kids. It is very likely that the kid will make “errors” in decoding, decoding words “incorrectly”. When they will hear those words at a later time, say, a lot of them will not be recognized. They will have to wait until someone reads them to them. This is why there is so much emphasis on parents reading to their kids, for instance. This is why there is so much emphasis on guided reading activities. The point is that all these irregularities do NOT prevent most learners to learn English, but –ALL THINGS BEING EQUAL– it delays learning. So, either you accept the idea that your taxes will remain high (allowing education budgets to remain high and literacy levels to remain high) or you don’t and then it is desirable to change the spelling system. To be honest, Simon, it’s been 400 years since anyone has SERIOUSLY and COMPETENTLY reformed it or standardised it. BTW, the FINNS did it in the 1950’s, which coincide strangely with their students doing much better a decade or two after on those PISA tests! Coincidence again? I don’t think so. Do you know anything that has not changed in 400 years? Why not do the right thing and make learning this beautiful language less of a challenge, MAKE IT MUCH QUICKER? Reading should be fun. Is it now?
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